Spanish Town Harbors No Love For Columbus

DATELINE - One of a series of reports on Spain as it prepares for the summer Olympics, is host to the world`s fair and celebrates the 500th anniversary of Columbus` voyage to the Americas.

July 5, 1992|By ROBERTO FABRICIO, Foreign Editor

PALOS DE LA FRONTERA, Spain -- If they were making a film about this cradle of explorers, the Cape Canaveral for the discovery of the Americas, they might call it Goodbye, Columbus!

Christopher Columbus is not very popular in Palos. In fact, Palos has finally found its fortune after a very rough 500 years --- not as the seafaring center that drew Columbus, but by becoming the strawberry basket of Europe.

The 7,000 people who live comfortably in this village symbolize much of the glory and the pain of modern Spain: a rapidly changing culture.

Neither their troubles nor their fortune has much to do with Columbus, who sailed from Palos on Aug. 2, 1492, and who is their favorite villain. Petroleum and strawberries are what enrich this town.

While the rest of Spain celebrates with pomp the 500th anniversary of the voyage launched from Palos, its citizens bitterly disagree with history, and blame Columbus.

``The man was a lying mercenary and carpetbagger who moved into our town and stole our glory and our men,`` said Pedro Oliva, 64, on a Sunday afternoon in the town square.

Columbus, who catapulted this fishing village into history and in the process discovered a continent, does not have a single statue or even a plaque in his honor.

The statue and monument to Columbus are across the river in Huelva.

Oliva, a strawberry farmer, said, ``It was Palos that discovered America, not Columbus.``

Looking down on Oliva is a towering white statue of Martin Alonso Pinzon, captain of the Pinta, Columbus` second-in-command and a native of Palos.

There is a Pinzon museum 15 steps from the plaza.

``Martin Alonso Pinzon, with his prestige and his knowledge, persuaded the sailors of Palos to go and the people to build the ships. That is why the discovery took place,`` Mayor Pilar del Pulgar said.

While urbane Seville, 100 miles to the west, got the $2.8 billion Expo 92 world`s fair and more billions in roads and a bullet train to Madrid, Palos got a set of flags from the former colonies.

``Palos has been greatly overlooked and forgotten in the celebrations,`` Pulgar said. ``There has been a concentration of things elsewhere, a fair at Seville and the Olympiad in Barcelona. Here, where it actually happened, it has been forgotten.``

The undertow of resentment toward the ``discovery,`` is with good reason, and goes beyond the 500th anniversary snub, she said.

She reminds visitors that it was Palos residents who paid for and built the Nina and the Pinta.

After putting up its ships and its men, Palos, which faces the eastern Atlantic with its bitter winters and windy summers, nearly disappeared into the dustbin of history.

``Most of the men of Palos either joined one of the voyages of Columbus or immigrated to America,`` she said. ``Thirty years after the discovery, Palos was inhabited by 600 women and old people; only those who could not leave stayed.``